Adjudication No. 238 (June 1985) [1985] APC 30

ADJUDICATION No. 238 (June 1985)

Mr G. K. Kolts, the First Parliamentary Counsel of the Commonwealth, complains of censorship and unfairness by the Sydney Morning Herald in its Letters column. On 1 January 1985 the paper published an editorial on the reform of legal language. Mr Kolts wrote a letter in reply. He received a phone call from the paper in which he was told that it intended to publish his letter but wished to delete the last paragraph, which included the continuation of a piece of doggerel about parliamentary draftsmen, part of which had been quoted in the editorial. Mr Kolts reluctantly agreed in order to get his letter published, and complains of censorship.

Subsequently two letters in reply to Mr Kolts were published, and he wrote a second letter to the editor in reply to one of them. It was not published and he complains of unfairness.

A major metropolitan newspaper such as the Sydney Morning Herald receives many more letters than it would be reasonable to publish. If it is to give its readers an opportunity to reply to particular matters, to challenge views which it expresses, and to raise important issues, it has to be highly selective of what it publishes and strict in enforcing brevity on letter writers. Inevitably many letter writers will be disappointed to see their work rejected or cut, and the person in charge of the column will have many difficult decisions to make.

The final paragraph of Mr Kolts' first letter was rejected by the paper because of a policy of discouraging verse which is expensive in space. The point -- that it is easy to criticise what you haven't tried -- could have been made much more briefly and derived no authority from its inclusion in the doggerel. The paper adopted a somewhat inflexible attitude about the verse, in view of the facts that it had used part of the same verse in the editorial, and that Mr Kolts offered to save equivalent space elsewhere in the letter. However, we think that the matter was within its legitimate discretion.

The main complaint in Mr Kolts' second letter is that he was refused an opportunity to correct a misrepresentation. In his first letter he had criticised the view that laws can be expressed in language capable of being comprehended by the ordinary educated citizen. A reply by a Professor of English said that "it is an error to assume -- as Mr Kolts seems to -- that difficulty in content must be matched by difficulty in language. Above all complexity in matter does not call for complicated, convoluted language." It went on to refer to gobbledygook.

We do not read this as saying that Mr Kolts advocated complicated, convoluted language or gobbledygook, which is what he sought to repudiate in his second letter. The passing reference to him was limited to the statement that he "seemed" to assume that difficulty in content must be matched by difficulty in language. Mr Kolts' second letter did not join issue with this statement, and we are not clear whether he would wish to do so. We do not see any such unfairness to Mr Kolts as required the paper to publish his letter.

The complaint is dismissed.